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This collaboration is significant both because it brings together three federal agencies to do what they do best individually to serve the American people, and it also is significant because we're hoping to change the paradigm by which toxicity of chemicals is established in this country - to move it, over time, from an animal-based system to a cell-based, in-vitro system.

The participants in the toxicology collaboration are ourselves, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Toxicology Program. To give you background about why we did this and why we are doing this, the mainstay of understanding what chemicals may be hazardous to human health has traditionally been done by animal testing. And animal testing has been tremendously valuable at identifying a myriad of toxins which are dangerous to human health. The problem with animal testing is that it's slow, it's very expensive and increasingly the public has become uncomfortable with the use of animals, large numbers of animals, particularly in the kinds of painful tests, sometimes, that establishing toxicology requires.

So at that end of the robot there are about 2.2 million compounds and what happens in the process is that cells are dispensed here that we want to test for some activity, and they're handed off via these robot arms to the compounds down there. Compounds are added, and then they're put in this incubator in the middle for some period of time - a couple of hours, a couple of days, whatever we tell it. And at the end of that time the robot arm goes back in, remembers when it put it into the incubator by the barcode that's on it, pulls it out, and puts it at one of these readers over here that tells you whether the compound, whether the chemical, was active or not. And we can run through a little over 2 million of those a week.

And I'll give you, give you a sense of how long that would take a person to do, if you had one person doing that by hand. We did that calculation a little while ago, and it would take a person eight hours a day, five days a week, for 12 years to do what we do in three days.

About three years ago, the EPA, the NTP, the National Toxicology Program based at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, another one of the NIH institutes and we here at the NCGC began a collaboration to ask could we identify a group of cell-based assays, that is tests of cells, or proteins, or genes which connect as a proxy for animal toxicology. And essentially what we're doing here is taking the rat or taking the person who might experience the toxicology and we're dissecting them into, not for real, but dissecting them theoretically into their various cell types - into brain cells, skin cells, lung cells, liver cells, kidney cells. And then we test each of those cells individually on our robot for toxic responses, for a variety of sorts. And then computationally we put the rat back together again and ask can we establish toxicity of one sort or another to the rat by doing these individual, cell-based tests.

6. Dr. Austin relates collaboration to a recent
National Research Council report calling
for a new toxicity testing strategy.

A very nice interlude in this planning happened in the spring when the National Research Council came out with a very important report about toxicity testing in the 21st century that advocated exactly what this group of free collaborators was already doing and has given tremendous affirmation and momentum to this project.

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